DARKEST Menagerie - A Journey into alternate africa

Africa has been a source of wonder and exploration to white people since almost the earliest civilizations.

The ancient Greeks and Roman thought Africa, to them simply called "Ethiopia", to be crawling with bizarre sub-human races, savage creatures such as the serpentine dragon and the leucrota, and bizarre animals unlike those in other places.

Fascination only grew during the middle-ages and renaissance, as people learned about creatures such as giraffes (to them, believed to the a hybrid of camel and leopard), true apes, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus. Victorian times brought with them the first zoos to house large collections of exotic animals, as much for science as for entertainment, people saw these African beasts for the first time, face to face.

As science progressed we eventually categorized and preserved specimens of many African beasts, but stories from explorers and great white hunters told of legends beyond the confines of science. The dragon myths re-surfaced, in the guise of supposed surviving brontosaurus, and as mankind's origins were unraveled in light of evolution, some people expected to find living, breathing ape-men in the jungle.

During the 20th and 21st centuries, the modern mythos and exploration of Cryptozoology ("hidden animals") has continued to search for these elusive beasts, while the scientific community regards such grand paradigm shifts as living dinosaurs and surviving ape-men as extremely unlikely. Some pseudo-scientific or misleading groups such as creationism and hollow-earth theories have also taken these ideas of true-to-life myths to heart.

The author of this page accepts evolutionary science as a fact, but it should be said, many advocates of cryptozoological prehistoric relics have been evolutionists too. A living dinosaur falsifies science only as much as does the coelocanth or horseshoe crab, which have survived in obscurity for many millions of years, and have an older pedigree than the dinosaurs. A living-ape man would answer the prayers of many physical anthropologists and evolutionists, a chance to study a live missing link. Indeed, archaeology tells us that mankind lived alongside primitive kinds of human until fairly recently, under this paradigm, it is perhaps remarkable that we have not found a living ape-man already.

Sadly, the actual hard evidence for many semi-mythical or hidden animals is extremely lacking, hard science and skepticism seem to be stacked against them. But the storytelling of monsters and cryptozoology serves purposes beyond science, it is to modern society, as mount Olympus, the griffin and the centaur were to the ancient Greeks. Everyone loves a good story, and monsters rate among the most popular stories of all time.

So what of these myriad myths of darkest Africa? What if Africa truly played host to a menagerie of unknown creatures, from dinosaurs, to ape-men, to giant birds and saber-toothed cats? Here in the following webpages, you will see my speculative portrayals of these myths, drawn as if they were living-breathing creatures. Think of it as an alternate Africa, where these myths had been true, and explorers had been met with a whole variety of savage beasts living in edenic splendor, untouched by civilized man.

The images on these webpages are an art and illustration project created by Timothy Donald Morris. All images are copyright Timothy Donald Morris, do not use or reproduce without permission. For contact details, see my portfolio website: http://portfolio-tdmorris.weebly.com/contact.html